From the graveyard of Urdu literary periodicals, which Pakistan has seen for a long time, has emerged a successful venture of high taste and meticulous scholarship. The credit goes to Ajmal Kamal who apart from being a good writer of Urdu is an excellent and brave translator. His productions is of high quality with virtually no printing errors that such large publications are prone to in Pakistan. It is Pakistan’s first worthy tribute to the struggle of the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina; it is also Karachi’s gesture of fellow-feeling with Sarajevo. His earlier collections of translated literature have also been well received. His volume on Marquez is a collector’s item, if for nothing else then for the pleasure of good rendition into Urdu of an author who is eminently translatable. He has also issued the Urdu version of Zamir Niazi’s classic expose of the Pakistani press; another volume of translations consists of Mohammad Umar Memon’s acknowledged work on the contemporary world’s great short stories. Ajmal Kamal is not merely a good translator; his selection of texts indicates his grasp of the subject. For the narration of history he has not chosen a prejudiced Muslim writer, but Noel Malcolm, a British writer who has written big book took to date on Bosnia while sitting in a country whose government is shamelessly biased against Bosnian Muslims. The reportage is represented by another Briton, journalist Robert Fisk who has earned renown because of his impartial overage of the wars in Lebanon and Bosnia. His ‘open letters’ are to mostly non-Muslim secular mix of Sarajevo citizens who celebrate humanity while savagery reigns around them. It is a tribute to Ajmal Kamal’s commitment that he has gathered in this volume of Aaj some of the best translator-writers in Pakistan: Asad Mohammad Khan, Mohammad Khalid Akhtar, Fehmida Riaz, and Mohammad Saleemur Rehman are some with whose work the reviewer is familiar. Mr Kamal has done almost half the translations and nowhere does the strain of hard work show. They are all high-quality renditions effortlessly communicating complex political and cultural developments in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It is a brave venture because it offers new Urdu words for meanings that Pakistani Urdu journalism has refused to tackle simply because the editors want to keep the language simple within a familiar vocabulary. Ajmal Kamal translates ‘pluralist’ as kaseer-mushtribi, ‘populist’ as qabuliati-pasandana, ‘monolithic’ as yak-paarcha, ‘xenophobia’ as ghairon ka aseb, khauf ethnic cleansing’ as nasli khalishiat. With full knowledge that these terms do not exist in Urdu. (You may have reservations about his rendition of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and his presentation of Serb-bashing, but most of the courage is fresh and interesting. He has understood the system of Serbo-Croat letters and rightly conveys it as is. His retention of bibliography and Roman letters to indicate the correct spelling of proper names introduces an important element in Urdu literature so far missing by our un-enlightened publishers because they refuse to accept the defects in Urdu orthography. The Bosnian Muslim was massacred by the Croats in the Second World War because he he fought against Hitler; now he is being massacred by the Serbs because Muslims agreed with the European yardstick of statehood based on majority population. Europe recognised all the new states arising from the ashes of Yugoslavia, but refused to defend Bosnia-Herzegovina after recognising it under the secular and pluralist presidency of Alija Izetbegovic. When the Serbs of Serbia under Milosevic invaded Bosnia in pursuit of Greater Serbia, the European leaders called it civil war. The Serb minority (30 percent) grabbed 70 percent of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the smallest minority Croats got 30 percent and asked the Muslim majority to live under the new status as a scattered minority. Europe has seen the Muslims being killed (today 200,000), their women raped, but kept making concessions to the Serbs. History has not seen a bigger injustice. Today Europe wants to give 49 percent of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina to the Serbs. The Muslims agree, but the Serbs don’t, and there is nothing the West is willing to do about it. Chechenya may be dismissed by the West as an internal affair of Russia, but Bosnia is an independent country sitting in the UN. Ajmal Kamal has brought before us the tragedy of Bosnian Muslims in words that can be trusted, rendered by people who know how to translate well and are writers of Urdu in their own right. Perhaps he should now do a volume on Chechenya and satisfy the curiosity of Urdu readers who know little about the region apart from the passionate but inexact articles appearing in our press. Special Issue on Bosnia A 528-page special number on Sarajevo. In a brief, bold, and precisely worded Introduction, editor Ajmal Kamal focuses on the tragedy of Bosnia; on the efforts of conscientious European writers and journalists both to underscore the true dimensions of the cultural loss and to suspend its tragic consequences in the realm of literature and to point out the affinity between the war-torn Bosnian capitol and the Pakistani city eruption of relentless culture of political violence. The Introduction is followed or selected extracts from the MALCOLM, KEMAL KURSPAHIC, F.FILIPOVIC, HANS MOLEMAN, MCCORKINDALE, MAJA FISH, EQBAL AHMAD, ROBERT FISK, MAKULIC, BORO TODOROVIC, SUSAN SONTAG, NEDZAD IBKISIMOVIC, IRFAN HOROZOVIC, A.S. BYATT, JULIAN BARNES, CLAUDIO MAGRIS, BORA COSIC, SLOBODAN BLAGOJEVIC, DRAGO JANCAR, JEAN HATZFELD, BOGDAN BOGDANOVIC, DZEVAD KARAHASAN, GORAN STEFANOVSKI, and DUBRAVKA UGRESIC. by translations of whole works writings of: V. P. GAGNON, JR., NOEL ZLATKO DIZDAREVIC, ZLATA JOHN MULLIN, LOUISE NATKA BUTUROVIC, MARC PONTHUS, ZORAN FILIPOVIC, SLAVENKA The translations are made by a group of Urdu writers, among them: MUHAMMAD KHALID AKHTAR, ASAD MUHAMMAD KHAN, FEHMIDA RIAZ, MUHAMMAD SALIM-UR-RAHMAN, ATA SIDDIQI, AFZAL AHMAD SYED, TANVIR ANJUM, IRFAN AHMAD KHAN, ZEESHAN SAHIL, ZINAT HISAM, and AJMAL KAMAL.